Explore logical thinking through a series of short poems about Ergo, a character you create, drawing your own pictures to illustrate the poems. In each poem, Ergo is in a muddle, making a common thinking mistake.

A guide for grown-ups explains the logical fallacies (muddle) involved in each poem.

Explore the design of an algorithm to allow someone with locked-in syndrome to communicate. Locked-in syndrome is a condition resulting from a stroke where a person is totally paralysed. They can see, hear and think but cannot speak. How could a person with Locked-in syndrome write a book? How might they do it if they knew some computational thinking?

Find a way for a Knight to visit every square on a board exactly once. In doing so find out what computational thinking is all about. See how algorithms are at its heart, allowing computer scientists to solve a problem once and then, as long as they have checked it carefully, avoid having to think about it ever again. See why computer scientists think hiding things makes their life easier, especially when they find a good way to represent information, and how an ability to match patterns lets the lazy computer scientist’s do no more work than absolutely necessary. Oh, and help a tourist guide at the same time.

Make a red and yellow hexahexaflexagon by folding and gluing a multicoloured paper strip, following the algorithm. Once made you start to explore it. As you fold it up and unfold it, you magically reveal new sides as the flexagon changes colour. To explore it fully, you need a map. A graph seems a good representation, which you create as you explore.

A graph is like a tube map, with circles (nodes) for places revealed and lines between them (edges) showing which circles you can move between by folding and unfolding the flexagon. It is a special kind of graph that can be thought of as a machine – a ‘finite state machine’. The nodes of the graph are different states the flexagon can be in and the edges show what actions that can be taken to move between states. It describes the computations involved in flexing the flexagon. A finite state machines is a very useful tools in the computational thinking toolbox. They are an important way for describing what computer systems do.

A Godlike Heart is a short story about computational thinking, introducing the idea of using binary to represent different kinds of information. Set in ancient Mexico it follows the story of the kidnapping of and subsequent search for the daughter of a great “Jaguar Knight”: a general in the Mexican army. It was written by Rafael Pérez y Pérez of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México and translated from the original Spanish by Paul Curzon, of Queen Mary University of London for cs4fn and Teaching London Computing.

Programming and Data Structure and Algorithm: Understanding Concepts

A gentle introduction to programming, data structures and algorithms for complete novices that avoids programming notation, instead focussing on helping you understand the concepts. Everything is explained in terms of everyday things, strange links and thought-provoking metaphors in the cs4fn ‘Computer Science for Fun’ style.

You take a book that involves Witches or Wizards, Macbeth for example, and demonstrate how magic has seeped into the words of such books over the ages. The volunteer picks a word from the start of the book and then, letting the book itself direct them, they end up with the word that no one could have possibly known, but that you predicted at the outset having hidden the prediction in an envelope that they have held all along

In exploring how the magic works, you learn about computational thinking: especially the importance of evaluation to algorithmic thinking. You explore both testing and hazard analysis.

The magic trick shows how computer scientists, engineers (and magicians) have to check their algorithms thoroughly. They must think carefully about how things might go wrong as well as checking they will go right.